I'm no longer involved at Signal
twitter.com
twitter.com
2. Moxie is paid for being on their board
3. Moxie directs non-profit Signal to integrate MobileCoin
4. MobileCoin offers 50% of their premine for sale.
5. Signal/Mobilecoin news spikes price to $60
6. Moxie steps down as CEO of Signal but remains on board
7. Mobilecoin price today is $0.09
8. Moxie is no longer involved at Signal
This is why we need decentralization.
That's an interesting interpretation. I read it as 'all cryptocurrencies are scams'.
Things like money and messaging are too important to a functioning society to allow any single party to control.
We need -actually- decentralized money and -actually- decentralized communication.
MobileCoin and Signal are neither and the results are predictable.
"Actually decentralized" has a lot of problems, especially with things like spam and scams (see also: usenet). Federation makes sure no single party has too much power, and yet allows one to have usable systems.
Sure cryptocurrency is not as widely accepted online or in person locally as US dollars, but it is far easier to spend those same places than my Euros which actually meets your definition of money.
A medium that can be exchanged for goods and services and is used as a measure of their values on the market, including among its forms a commodity such as gold, an officially issued coin or note, or a deposit in a checking account or other readily liquefiable account.Sounded very much like a inner circle backroom deal kind of moment.
Guess they figured it out!
> signal is an 501c3 nonprofit and that's a sort of you know an incorporation of you know in the US where you you agree not to take you know profits you get Revenue you can get Revenue but you're you not for profit and you have kind of a charitable aim and that requires that you do certain transparency protocols so there's sort of forms we file that show our finances that also means that we don't take sort of investment in the classic venture capitalist sense and that we cannot be acquire we could be acquired but you know the executives and the the board would not get a payout so if we sold signal for billions of dollars to say you know Palantir here or something evil like that um we would have to reinvest that money in charitable causes um now why is our incorporation structure important well it's actually one of the key barriers or key protections I would say like a rampart that allows us to keep fully focused on our mission of providing you know meaningful private Communications and in Tech that is you know particularly important because the barrier we're protecting against is the fact that the business model in Tech is monetizing surveillance so if we had investors if we had you know you know limited partners breathing down our neck if we had you know shareholders who were sort of hassling that one old guy on our board about you know increasing revenues or growth or this doesn't look too good the Privacy thing that seems a little dated we're not getting the kind of growth we need um we would be pushed to compromise our privacy Focus because the money lies in surveillance
There’s older blog posts from Signal explaining the same, but I feel the current Signal team is very well equipped to avoid hostile takeovers.
The other problem is Signal is now in a tacit monopoly position because neither the Apple or Google app stores will allow an app that does not do content moderation, and there is zero chance of them being challenged on that by the current US admin. I'm not sure what the current status is, but Element/Matrix was quietly cut out of the mobile market through that coordination. Judging by the stakes and the players, to me there's something very, very sinister about Marlinspike's exit as well.
Imo, the canaries for some very serious political problems are dropping like flies, and one of their tools is stacking boards of software projects with assets from compromised institutions.
It is true to say that Matrix is more at risk than Signal, though, given Matrix allows for public chatrooms - whereas in Signal you have to invited into whatever abusive content rather than being able to selfinvite (ie join).
> "I'm no longer involved at Signal. While I may wish a lot of different things for it, the whole point of the project is that you don't have to trust your communication to anyone."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphrase#Analysis
> double quotes means a literal quote
Most recent are a reasonably mundane culture wars stuff but (more interesting to HN) it seems earlier Signal related ones appear to suggesting a degree of alignment with the USA government. The words "spook" and "compromised" are used in different comments.
Edits. From the Signal page:
"She is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, where she advises the Secretary of State on technology policy"
From the tweet:
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a "free and open" internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a "white male Westernized construct" and "did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be."
There is a video of her speaking, which I find hard to translate.
which may explain some of it. It reminds me of an odd experience I had with Wikipedia around covid time - I edit a bit and thought you could say covid may have arisen zoonotically like all previous such pandemics or may have come from the nearby lab which was running job ads for bat coronavirus researchers at the time of the outbreak and as an open wiki you could consider both but no - the lab stuff was largely verboten and unmentionable. I guess the above article explains a bit how that happened maybe?